The Ultimate Persuasion: A Tempestuous Temptation / The Notorious Gabriel Diaz / The Truth Behind his Touch. Cathy Williams
Then he stood up and held out one hand. ‘I’m going to run a bath,’ he murmured. ‘Your room’s next to mine. Why don’t you go and get some clothes…?’
‘It feels weird,’ Aggie confided. ‘I’ve never approached an intimate situation like this.’
‘But then this is an intimate situation neither of us expected,’ Luiz murmured. ‘And that in itself is a first for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It never fails to surprise me just how turned on I get for you.’
‘Because I’m nothing like the women you’ve gone out with?’
‘Because you’re nothing like the women I’ve gone out with,’ Luiz agreed.
Aggie knew that she should be offended by that, but then who would she be kidding? He was nothing like the guys she had gone out with. Mutual physical attraction had barrelled through everything and changed the parameters. Maybe that was why it felt so dangerously exciting.
‘You’re a lot more independent and I find that a turn on.’ He softly ran his fingers along her side. He couldn’t wait for her to be naked but this leisurely approach was intoxicating. ‘You’re not a slave to fashion and you’re fond of arguing.’
Aggie conceded privately that all three of those things represented a change for him, but a change that he would rapidly tire of. Since she wasn’t in it for the long haul, since she too was stepping outside the box, there was no harm in that, although she was uneasily aware of a barely acknowledged disappointment floating aimlessly inside her.
‘You like your women submissive,’ she said with a little laugh.
‘Generally speaking, it’s worked in the past.’
‘And I like my guys to be creative, not to be ruled by money.’
‘And yet, mysteriously, your creative paupers have all bitten the dust.’ Luiz found, to his bemusement, that he didn’t care for the thought of any other man in her life. It was puzzling, because he had never been the possessive type. In fact, in the past women who had tried to stir up a non-existent jealousy gene by referring to past lovers had succeeded in doing the opposite.
‘They haven’t been paupers,’ Aggie laughed. ‘Neither of them. They’ve just been indifferent to money.’
‘And in the end they bored you.’
‘I’m beginning to wish I’d never mentioned that,’ Aggie said, though only half-joking. ‘And if they bored me,’ she felt obliged to elaborate, ‘it was because they turned out to be boring people, not because they were indifferent to money.’ She wriggled off the bed and stood up. ‘Perhaps I’ll have a bath in my own bathroom…’
Luiz frowned, propping himself up on one elbow. ‘Second thoughts?’ His voice was neutral but his eyes had cooled.
‘No.’ Aggie tilted her chin to look at him. ‘I don’t play games like that.’
‘Good.’ He felt himself relax. To have been rejected once bordered on the unthinkable. To be rejected twice would have been beyond the pale. ‘Then what games do you play? Because I think I can help you out there…’
The promise behind those softly spoken words sent a shiver up her spine and it was still there when she returned to his bedroom a few minutes later. She had not been lying when she had confessed that she had never approached sex like this before. Stripped of all romantic mystique and airy-fairy expectations that it would lead somewhere, this was physical contact reduced to its most concentrated form.
The bath had been run. Aggie could smell the fragrance of jasmine bath oil. The steam in the enormous bathroom did nothing whatsoever to diminish the impact of Luiz, who had stripped out of his clothes and was wearing a towel around his waist.
Outside, the snow continued to fall. In her room, she had taken a few seconds to stare out of the window and absorb the fact that Mark and Maria, and the mission upon which they had embarked only a few days previously, couldn’t have been further from her mind. When exactly had she lost track of the reason why she was here in the first place? It was as though she had opened the wardrobe door to find herself stepping into Narnia, reality left behind for a brief window in time.
She could barely remember the routine of her day-to-day existence. The school, the staff room, the kids getting ready for their Nativity play.
Was Luiz right? She had always fancied herself as a free-spirited person and yet she felt as though this was the first impulsive thing she had ever done in her life. She had thought him freakishly controlled, a power-hungry tycoon addicted to mastering everything and everyone around him, while she—well, she was completely different. Maybe the only difference really was the fact that he was rich and she wasn’t, that he had grown up with privilege while she had had to fight her way out of her background, burying herself in studies that could provide her with opportunities.
‘Now, what I’d like…’ Luiz drawled, and Aggie blinked herself back to the present, ‘is to do what I was fantasising about when you did your little catwalk in that shop for me. Instead of showing me how you look with clothes on, show me how you look with them off.’
He sauntered out of the bathroom and lay back down on the bed, just as he had before.
Aggie realised in some part of her that, whilst this should not feel right, it did. She would never have believed it possible for either of them to set aside their personal differences and meet on this plane. Certainly, she would never have believed it of herself, but before she could begin nurturing any doubts about the radical decision she had made she told herself that everyone deserves some time out, and this was her time out. In a day or two, it would be nothing more than a wicked memory of the one and only time she had truly strayed from the path she had laid out for herself.
She watched, fascinated and tingling all over, shocked as he drew back the towel which had been modestly covering him, and revealed his arousal. She nearly fainted when he gently held it in one hand.
Luiz grinned at her. ‘So easy to make you blush,’ he murmured. Then he fell silent and watched as she began removing her clothes, at first with self-conscious, fumbling fingers, then with more confidence as she revelled in the sight of his darkened, openly appreciative gaze.
‘Come here,’ he rasped roughly, before she could remove the final strips of clothing. ‘I’m finding it hard to wait.’
Aggie sighed and flung her head back as his big hands curved over her breasts, thinly sheathed in a lacy bra. Their mouths met in an explosive kiss, a greedy, hungry kiss, so that they gasped as they surfaced for air and then resumed their kissing as if neither could get enough of the other. Her nipples were tender and sensitive and she moaned when he rolled his thumb over one stiffened peak, seeking and finding it through the lacy gaps in the bra.
She was melting. Freeing a hand from the tangle of his black hair, she shakily pulled off the panties which were damp, proof of her own out-of-control libido.
Luiz was going crazy with wanting her. He could hardly bear the brief separation of their bodies as she unclasped her bra from the back and pulled it off.
Her nipples were big, circular discs, clearly defined, pouting temptingly at him. He realised that he had been fantasising about this moment perhaps from the very first time he had laid eyes on her. He had not allowed himself to see her in a sexual way, not when he had been busy working out how to disengage her and her brother from his niece and the family fortune. But enforced time together had whittled away his self-control. It had allowed the seeds of attraction to take root and flourish.
‘You have the face of an angel,’ he breathed huskily as he rolled her on top of him. ‘And the body of a siren.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’ Aggie gazed down at him. ‘Aren’t sirens supposed to be voluptuous?’
‘God, you’re beautiful…’ His hands could almost span her waist and he eased her down so